


Love Letters Composed in Solitude

by orphan_account



Category: Welcome to Night Vale
Genre: Communication Difficulties, Eventual Fluff, Loneliness, M/M, NT privilege, monologues, neuro-atypical character, working out a relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-01
Updated: 2014-03-03
Packaged: 2018-01-14 05:19:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 7,301
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1254298
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Cecil gets lost in his head. Carlos gets lost in his head. Eventually, they find their way back to each other.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Cecil

**Author's Note:**

  * For [chess_ka](https://archiveofourown.org/users/chess_ka/gifts).



Good afternoon, Listeners. 

You can’t hear me—despite my light-hearted japes to the contrary, I am not always in possession of my microphone, particularly at this hour of the day—but it’s Cecil, here, nonetheless. Broadcasting on nothing other than my own brainwaves, which shouldn’t be audible to anyone, unless the sheriff’s secret police are even more on the job than usual today. I doubt that’s the case, though. Budget cuts are affecting every municipal department these days.

It’s about ten in the morning, and I am presently enjoying a leisurely breakfast at home with my boyfriend Carlos. Dear Carlos, who insists on vacating our perfectly warm and cozy bed at the crack of seven a.m.—or at least, at the time that most closely corresponds to six individual hours composed of sixty minutes apiece, following the time he went to bed. Carlos insists that the watch he gave me for our one-month anniversary is more likely to record that passage of time accurately than his own alarm clock, so I am now in the habit of leaving my watch on the table next to his side of the bed when I remove it at night. I don’t mind, since it’s always back on my table again by the time I wake up. You see, unlike Carlos, I prefer to sleep until my body decides that it has had enough of sleeping, and signals this fact by restoring me, painlessly and sweetly, to consciousness. It is an autonomic process that has always worked perfectly well for me, but of course Carlos has his own morning routine, and adjusting to the morning routine of one’s partner is just part of making a home together.

(We’re still looking for a suitable place for the two of us since the fiasco with the condos, so at the moment, we spend most of our time in my apartment. It is _my_ apartment, but it is _our_ home. You understand.)

I don’t need to be at work for several hours, although Carlos has told me that he will need to return to his lab as soon as we’ve finished our coffee and potato bread toast with brillberry jam and goat butter. Otherwise, Listeners, I would be at my microphone, and you would be able to hear me, and I would scarcely be able to speak so candidly. Carlos and I have arrived at an understanding when it comes to my sharing personal details of our lives over the radio. Not that I feel any pressing need to broadcast these small and relatively inconsequential compromises—no, not compromises—adjustments—with my radio audience. No, Carlos and I are making do very easily, and even the small annoyance of being awakened by Carlos’s alarm at uncivilized hours of the morning are easily adjusted to, when I am so richly compensated by the daily gift of finding Carlos in my bed each morning, and having him in my bed when I retire in the evening. 

It isn’t wishful thinking that brings me to address my inner monologue to you, Listeners. I am not disappointed by the fact that you cannot hear my words at this moment; I wouldn’t change that fact even if Carlos were more comfortable with the idea of strangers knowing about his somewhat idiosyncratic taste in toast adornments. Narrating my morning routine to a non-existent audience is simply a habit that I fell into, much earlier in my career, before I had acclimated fully to the demands of my work; back when the idea of holding forth a one-sided conversation with a faceless and voiceless audience over a radio microphone made me feel awkward—even, if you can believe it, occasionally tongue-tied.

I’ve long since grown comfortable in my role as a radio host. I feel a bond with all of my listeners, and you have long since ceased to be faceless, or even voiceless, in my imagination. I feel a deep kinship with all of you, which is why I feel certain that you wouldn’t begrudge the fact that sometimes, as now, I focus on the hypothetical prospect of your hypothetical presence when I am attempting to compose my own private thoughts. You might be surprised if I told you that, left to my own devices, I am occasionally give to flights of fancy. I’m easily derailed by possibilities and tangents. But when I imagine myself addressing you, dear Listeners, it is easier to keep my train of thought firmly on its rails.

My, my. Thinking back over all of that, it sounds as though I must have something terribly serious on my mind, a topic which demands the sharpest, least-muddled cognition I can muster. Rest assured, it’s nothing so dire as that.

If this were a broadcast, and you could hear me, Listeners, you would probably laugh. Not in a mean-spirited or derisive way, I am sure, but with that pleasant contempt we are none of us immune to feeling when a community fixture like myself insists on inviting what familiarity always breeds. Because today’s thoughts have to do with Carlos; beautiful Carlos, whom I love, and whom you are all well aware that I love. Over the course of the last year or so, I have presented to my listeners many a quandary, many an insecurity related to our budding, and now flourishing romance. I have felt less inclined to do this lately, since I became aware that he makes a regular habit of listening to my show, and since he expressed a wish for more discretion on my part, regarding our personal lives. 

But here, in the safety of my thoughts, where I can confide anything to my Listeners, without the least fear of being indiscreet, or of embarrassing my darling Carlos, or of boring you with details that are of the utmost importance to me, but of significantly less importance to you—I may unburden myself without fear of being tactless. 

We are sitting at the breakfast table. Carlos has just finished the last of his coffee and toast, and is bidding me farewell for the morning, so I will shortly be at liberty to indulge my inner monologue without the risk of seeming inattentive to the one person who possesses unfailing power to hold my attention rapt with even the slightest minutiae of his daily life, or his thinking.

He is kissing me on the cheek right now. He shaved his beard recently, which saddened me somewhat, but I cannot pretend not to appreciate the attractive youthfulness of his clean-shaven appearance. His hair, at least, remains buoyant and luxurious, and I indulge myself by running my fingers through it during the brief moments in which he leans his face close to mine.

“I have fieldwork today,” says Carlos, hesitating beside my chair. “It’s too delicate to entrust to any of my assistants. I’ll be in the sand wastes until the evening.”

“Do you have enough water?” I say, because dropping concerned reminders regarding his physical well-being is the first thing the boyfriend of a scientist does.

“Yes, the flat of water bottles you gave me last week is still in the trunk of my car.” Carlos says this matter-of-factly, with no specific tone or inflection. “The readings I’m getting from the sand wastes are fascinating. The data collection sites are spread out across a ten mile radius so it will take some time to gather the readings. I can only hope to start the lab analysis tonight. It’s going to take a long time. Days, probably.”

I blink rapidly. My face does not betray the rigid musculature formation that I practiced in the bathroom for hours, until I was satisfied I had achieved a look that said “supportive boyfriend.” Internally, however, I felt chasms open inside me, pits of longing and sadness.

“That sounds very exciting,” I say.

Carlos smiles. “It is. All of my research is particularly exciting lately, but this promises some of the most fascinating results we’ve had in month. I’ll probably be in the lab the rest of the night.” He pats the pockets of his lab coat. “Do you remember where I left my keys?”

“Try the chili pepper on the island.” I had placed the ceramic chili-pepper ashtray—a gag gift from an intern who died so long ago I no longer remember her name—on the kitchen island specifically so that Carlos would have a consistent place to drop his keys when he came home. He is rather absent-minded about them, otherwise.

“Oh, yes. Thank you.” Carlos retrieves his keys, and the field pack he takes with him, whenever he works outside the lab. “Have a good day!” he says, in his sweet tenor voice. Then the door shuts.

The door shuts, Listener, and I am left alone at the breakfast table, staring at the dirty breakfast dishes, and considering whether the stained, gnawed, purplish remnants of our toast constitutes a sound metaphor for the long, lonely evening that I know now will be facing me after work. An evening in which, it is true, we had no fixed plans, nothing that we discussed and agreed upon ahead of time. Except that when two people live together—make a home together—they settle into routines, you know? And routines are almost like plans. Our routines normally involve the communal preparation of dinner, and then the watching of whatever the most interesting thing (according to flexible definitions of the words ‘interesting’) happens to be on TV or on Neflix that evening.

It’s a fairly flimsy routine, when you look at it, but I’ve come to depend on it. And when it’s snatched from me—even by something as normal as exciting new developments in Carlos’s scientific research—it stings a bit. I wish that it didn’t, but it does.

Listeners, I would never tell you this over the airwaves because I would never want to discourage anyone from pursuing true love wherever they can find it, with engines racing and throttles open. I would never wish to frighten the inexperienced into feeling that love isn’t worth the price—either the literal price of the relationship-registration forms required by City Hall, or the metaphorical price that comes in the form of small disappointments, or little, ragged hopes that are crushed before they can be given voice.

But all the same, Listeners: it hurts to love Carlos, sometimes. It hurts whenever you choose, against all common sense and self-preservation, to knit your life and your being to another person who is independent from you and thus cannot hear the thump of your heart each time they enter the room, the racing of your pulse when they answer the phone, the wordless cry of dismay that exists nowhere but the aching cavity of your chest when, for whatever reason, they fail to say the exact words that you need to hear at the time you most need to hear them. 

When your peace of mind and emotional equanimity depends on another person being present—just that, merely present—present, and available, in ways that came so naturally to the both of you in the beginning, so naturally that you never even realized you were taking them for granted until routine settled in, and your lives, though still joined, meandered down divergent paths, not far enough away from each other to split you in two, just far enough that you feel the strain every time they walk out the door—and when you can’t quite bring yourself to say something, because after all, you are independent people, adults, with your own lives, and you don’t want to be clingy—

When you love a person, and they love you back, but they simply don’t _need_ you quite as much as you need them—

It hurts, Listeners. And while you would never, not in a hundred years, not in a thousand lifetimes measured by any temporal unit known to science, trade it for the alternative, for the absence of the beloved figure from your life—it doesn’t stop hurting.

At least, I have not yet found a means to make it stop.


	2. Carlos

When I first came to Night Vale, I underestimated the potential scope of all that this city has to offer the empirical researcher. You are not a scientist, Cecil, so this is difficult for me to explain; I suppose that is why I rehearse speeches like this one when I’m away from you, so that I can speak more fluently when we’re together again. 

I wonder sometimes if you understand how intimidating—no—daunting—how daunting it can be to attempt to communicate matters of great importance to someone who is naturally much more eloquent than oneself. 

Society places different premiums on different skill sets. I am a scientist. “Scientist” is a title that evokes a certain measure of respect in strangers. But because most people do not really understand what a scientist is, the respect that the title evokes tends to fade quickly, eventually overshadowed by confusion. Confusion can lead to hostility, or at least to a blank incomprehension that people defend themselves against by simply ignoring the source of it. In other words, people tend to stop listening to me shortly after I begin speaking to them. This is especially distressing when I have news of great importance to relate, though I have always been able to rely on you, Cecil, to relate important scientific developments to your radio audience. 

I don’t think I’ve ever told you how much I rely on your capacity to translate the concepts I relate to you into speech that other people will easily understand. I try very hard to be clear and concise and emphasize only the most crucial data, but somehow you manage to not only comprehend my words, but re-shape them into a configuration that your listeners will understand and accept.

I have observed on many occasions that the act of communication, and the results that it yields, are very different for you than they are for me. When you introduce yourself to strangers, the title of “radio host” is instantly understood by your audience, because statistically the chances that your audience will be familiar with the function of radio is very high. But—and this is crucial—you don’t have to rely on strangers possessing a deep or continued understanding of your job in order for them to give weight to your words. You know how to hold their attention and command their respect. All you have to do is continue to speak to them. 

When you speak, it ceases to matter what your job is or whether anyone understands it; or how impressive your professional accomplishments are; or whether colleagues in your own field esteem you. Because you, Cecil, are capable of connecting to your audience almost instantly, whoever they are, and holding their attention for as long as you desire it. And while, in a statistical analysis, people who work in STEM fields are often paid better and are considered to possess higher relative social ranking than community radio hosts, the fact remains that society—and here, I am speaking generally, even anecdotally, from my own experience—society places a much higher premium on the skills that you possess than on the skills that I possess. In other words, ordinary people value other people who are able to make them feel valued. This is your skill. Actually, I hesitate to call it is a skill, because it is so unquantifiable, so outside measurable standards, that I think it would be more accurate to call it a gift. “Gift” is not a scientific term, not according to the standards of my training, but my time in Night Vale has taught me the limits of my understanding. I hope it has taught me to be flexible in quantifying all manner of phenomenon. 

—I am diverting from my initial purpose. Funny, how that’s possible, even when there is nothing to distract me but my own thoughts, which I used to think were highly disciplined.

Cecil. You connect with people. You seem to do so almost effortlessly. At least, to me, it appears effortless. I am a practiced public speaker in my own right—this is not a skill that came naturally to em, but it is one that I was obliged to acquire in the course of my career. The difference between you and me, however, is that I always rely on prepared remarks. I can pronounce the words in a script fluently, pitch my voice to a level that is comfortable to the ear, but even when I am addressing colleagues in my own field, it is rare for me to feel that anyone is really listening.

Scientifically speaking, my inability to connect to other human beings has been known to produce emotions such as loneliness, and a sense of alienation. Remarkably, however, for a scientist trained in the gathering of empirical data, I was barely aware of these feelings until I met you. Because, Cecil, _you_ listen to me. I am aware that you do not always understand the nuances of what I am attempting to communicate, but I am inclined to think that this is more my fault than yours. I am not incapable of appreciating nuance, but I am most sensitive to it when I am evaluating data that is unbiased by the infinitely complicated variables introduced by human factors: factors such as affection, and the courtesy that stems from affection that makes the speaker reluctant to insist on stricter and less subjective terminology, because of the human element—because they do not want to make the other person feel inferior or uncomfortable in a human setting in which I am already inclined to feel a certain amount of discomfort. I am a scientist, but in this, I am not an expert: not when it comes to the ineffable phenomenon that occurs when two human beings connect on a level that catalyzes baffling—no, not baffling—sublime levels of chemical reaction and sub-reaction that produces subjective, biologically based experiences that we call emotions.

I think, Cecil, that what I am trying to learn to how to say to you—here in the safety of my head, surrounded by miles of desert waste, where I cannot be distracted by anything other than the humming of the various machines and devices that collect data for me, which I, ostensibly, have come here to collect from them in turn—is that I am not, in most ways, an ideal partner for you. But you are an ideal parter for me. 

Before I met you, I never imagined wanting to share my life with another person. But if I had imagined it, I think I would have imagined that person to be someone like myself. Someone for whom communication was merely a tool and attention was a reward bestowed on the sharing of only the most relevant, pertinent, important information. Someone who would understand me effortlessly, because we had training, and a specific use of language in common. 

Nothing in the course of my life or my education prepared me the reactions that were catalyzed within me when I first began to realize that there was nothing I could say to you that you didn’t wish to listen to. Not just listen to, but bring the full bearing of your own not-inconsiderable intellect to bear on matters outside your own education and training so that you could _understand_. Not because the information I related was a warning of imminent danger, but simply because I was speaking. And you took pleasure—simple, personal, irrational pleasure—in listening to me speak.

I believe that is why I fell in love with you. But I worry. I worry because, however hard you try to understand the spoken communication of a person who was never trained to communicate primarily in words and language, I know there are things that I attempt to convey, but that you miss. Again, I feel to blame for this. Cecil, I wish that I could connect electrodes between our skulls—electrodes of a kind that haven’t yet been invented of course, otherwise I would already have suggested this—so that the pure data that exists inside me, the particles and electrons and chemical cocktails that form the biological basis of the bond that I feel with you—could travel effortlessly into your mind. If this were possible, you wouldn’t have to keep grappling with my inefficient, maladroit grasp of language in order to understand the subatomic level on which the particles of your being have intermingled with mine.

Failing rapid advances in technology that would render this solution something more than an idle, wish-fulfillment fantasy of mine, I wish—

I wish I could just learn to be better at talking to you.

Today, for example: when I told you that I would be working all day and most of the night in the sand wastes, and later in my lab, I saw the look on your face. I’m getting better at distinguishing facial expressions, or at least, at distinguishing yours. I think I am, anyway. I could sense the disappointment you felt, and I understood, though I could not articulate my understanding, that you had been looking forward to seeing me this evening after work. Immediately, I envisioned a scenario in which you came to visit me in my lab, finding me bent over my work station. In this scenario, you were bearing dinner in styrofoam containers with plastic eating utensils and those strange, thin napkins that come in the plastic envelopes with small salt and pepper packets. You’ve done this before, when I was working late, and you have a highly-developed instinct for showing up at the perfect time, just as the ache in my back becomes impossible to ignore any longer, and I can no longer focus efficiently on the readings I’m taking because I’ve become light-headed from hunger. I envisioned this scenario, and it made me happy, but I didn’t suggest it out loud. I was afraid that you would consider it an imposition. Later, it occurred to me that you did not make the offer yourself because you were afraid that _you_ would be an imposition. Either possibility stood an equal chance of being true, until one of us suggested it aloud, using language. But neither of us did that. Why did neither of us do that? On my part, I can attribute it to awkwardness, a fear of using words incorrectly and thus creating a conflict when no conflict was threatening. 

I dislike conflict intensely. I’m not sure if you know that about me.

But you, Cecil: with your fluent, elegant, beautiful words. You could have said something. And you didn’t. And because a scientist must take negative data into account along with positive data, I assumed that you knew something I didn’t. The gift you possess is easiest for me to understand when I imagine it as a mechanism, a sensitively calibrated device, internal to you, that evaluates and processes the unquantifiable data generated by human behavior, and produces results that are accurate beyond anything that my own analogous, inferior internal mechanism is capable of producing. I assumed, that using this gift of yours, you foresaw a potential conflict, and gracefully avoided it. By saying nothing about the late hours I would be keeping, or suggesting that we meet later in my lab, when I would be alone and hungry and overtired.

It is getting dark out here in the sand wastes. I have collected the data generated by the devices I planted here; in a moment or two I will return to my lab, to investigate these readings. I am hungry, I think, but I will forget about that as soon as I get back to work. 

What I will not forget is the mystery of what would have happened, if I had spoken to you, or you had spoken to me, this morning. The puzzle of how we fit together—how we can continue to co-exist, in a partnership, as a couple, with dreams of a shared home—buzzes continually at the back of my mind, and I know that this morning’s misunderstanding—no, not misunderstanding—silence— is just one piece of it.

I will think about calling you when I return to my lab. I won’t know whether or not I will actually do it until I have done it, or not done it. Scientists exist in a state of continuous uncertainty; that is one of the leading characteristics that defines a scientist.

There is only one thing that is not a mystery, even though it is inexplicable. It is the fact that I love you, and that even though we saw each other just a few hours ago, I will miss you tonight.

I wonder if you will miss me too?


	3. Cecil (Together)

Listeners—oh, Listeners. How I wish I could broadcast the thoughts that are swarming my mind now like a plague of fanged locusts. How I wish that when I signed off just a few minutes ago I had been able to speak to you as frankly and unreservedly as I wished to. Our little city is changing. No, not changing. It is _being_ changed, by pernicious, colonizing elements that we did not invite and do not welcome. But you are not my only Listeners these days, as I think you must be aware. I am being _listened to_. It is a very different thing from the comfortable relationship that I have established with you—all of the yous—over the course of my tenure as a radio host. 

But, Listeners, I am not the only source of information and awareness available to you. At a time like this—especially a time like this—I hope that your ears, and your eyes, and your mouths, and your vestigial sensory organs are open to every tremor that reverberates through our city. And I hope that you will know how to act on the information that you receive, via whatever channel you can receive it.

I don’t dare dwell on this subject for too long. You may not know this about old Cecil, Listeners, but he has a bit of a temper, and it sometimes leads him to say and do indiscreet things. If I were a younger man, I would be tempted to throw myself head-long into the fray—to cease to be the voice that speaks sweetly to you in the evenings, and become instead the Cecil Palmer who achieved the rank of Weird Scout, and graduated from college with honors in English literature, library navigation, and subversive surveillance tactics. 

Alas, I am not so young anymore. I have Carlos to think about now; precious, ever-so-slightly naive Carlos, an Outsider in our little town. Who, and I would not wish you to think otherwise, can be very dangerous in his own right—he can do things with chemical compounds that I shudder to think about—but whose education was sadly lacking in such things as basic firearms training, espionage, and covert maneuvering. The American public school system has a great many deficiencies, Listeners. We have been privileged, in our own little burgh, to have additional funding from certain, shall we say, unnamed sources, that enable us to educate our children to a level of survival proficiency that makes us the envy of every other county in the state. But Outsiders are not always so fortunate. And an Outsider in Night Vale is particularly vulnerable. I dare not make myself more of a target than I am. Our enemies can throw whatever hurdles they like at me, but I am paralyzed with dread that they may take a more terrifyingly direct route, and set their sights on my darling Carlos. There are already whispers in that direction. Even here, in the privacy of my own thoughts, I scarcely dare say more.

Tonight, knowing that Carlos is busily at work in his lab full of bubbling beakers and whirring machinery, I have elected to obtain my dinner from Big Rico’s—and not a moment too soon, considering that I have been so preoccupied with other matters that I have left my mandatory weekly Big Rico’s consumption rather to the last minute. Rico and I go way back, however, so he doesn’t give me a hard time when he serves up a plate of basil, nutmeg, and green pepper pizza on gluten free crust. I manage to consume it before the clock strikes eight, which is a lucky thing, since otherwise I would have been in defiance of city ordinances and compelled to present myself for re-education at City Hall in the morning. The single slice of pizza isn’t quite enough to fill me up, but I don’t feel particularly like hanging around a public establishment any longer, where anyone could walk in and…observe me. So I’m just making my way to the counter to order a ten-inch individual pizza to go, when the door bell chimes behind me.

I turn to look at the newcomer. I always turn to look at the newcomers; one can never tell how new they might be, or what motivations they may be concealing behind a mask of excessively sunny good cheer. It is difficult not to be suspicious of an excessively sunny disposition in Night Vale, these days. The sun is great and terrible, Listeners. We depend on it; it both sustains life, and sometimes takes it away, leaving nothing but desiccated, mummified corpses littering the sand wastes. It does not, and has never, smiled upon us. We regard it with the same awe and worshipful trepidation that we owe to all the forces in this town that bear inexorable sway over our bodies and minds. Those who embrace the sun, symbolically, cheerfully, and make excessive reference to it in their propaganda—well. It seems to me that there are certain crucial facts about heliocentrism that they do not quite grasp.

“Oh.” Carlos blinks at me as the bell over the restaurant door tinkles shut behind him. “Cecil. I wasn’t expecting to see you here.”

All at once, Listeners, my suspicions—and that prickly vigilance I have carried with me since I left work a few minutes ago—melts away in a pool of relief, and delight, and the slightest hint of trepidation without which any pleasant feeling would be too unreal to be trustworthy.

“Hey!” I say to him, because I’m not sure what else to say. I wish to convey happiness at having run into him here, without giving the impression that I came to Rico’s—which, after all, is just across a sandy lot from Carlos’s lab—in the hopes of ambushing him into a surprise meeting. I assure you, Listeners, I had no such intention. I had assumed that Carlos would, as is his habit, forget all about bodily necessities like eating, when he had so much work to do tonight. 

“Did you—I mean—how’s the research going?” I ask, wiping my sweating palms unobtrusively against the satin fabric of my bell-bottomed trousers.

“It’s going well,” he says, eager and bright. “I successfully gathered the readings from all of my outpost machinery. I’ve been evaluating the data since I returned to my lab.”

“Uh huh,” I said. “Well, that’s…great! Um, are you finished, or are you just taking a break?”

Carlos frowns, as though puzzled by the question. “My efficiency in organizing the results began to diminish about twenty minutes ago. I took a standard reading of environmental factors that might be contributing to the effect, and I—” Carlos blushes. It is an extraordinary sight, and I permit myself to bask in it for a moment. “I realized that I was hungry. Blood sugar drops have a direct correlation to impaired concentration levels, so…scientifically speaking, I thought I should get something to eat.”

I can’t help tutting at him under my breath. “I thought we’d talked about this before.”

“Yes. We’ve discussed it several times. The information is here, in my head, but it sometimes gets pushed aside in favor of other, more immediate and captivating concerns.” Carlos swallows once, hard. “It is also possible that the fact that I saw you driving into the parking lot influenced the priority I found myself placing on the immediate need for sustenance.”

My heart begins to beat a bit faster, and it is possible that I too begin blushing (though Carlos doesn’t mention it, and he is far too tactful to suggest that I look in a mirror.) “Would you…that is, I know that science is very pressing and all, but—I mean, if you were going to eat anyway—”

“I was hoping to catch you before you’d eaten, actually,” says Carlos, in a bit of a rush. Almost as though he is embarrassed by more than his continued inattention to the demands of his digestion. “I was also hoping, as a correlation to the first hypothesis, that we could get our food at the same time and take it to the lab. I cleared a work bench for you, so you could eat without worrying about cross-contamination.”

Listeners. Although words are my stock-in-trade, there are specific moments when no one, however verbally adept they may be in articulating feeling and emotion, can readily or fluently express what they are feeling. These include moments when a hoped-for, wished-for eventuality is suddenly, shockingly transformed into reality.

“If you’ve already eaten, then of course it doesn’t matter,” Carlos continues hastily. “I’m sure you’re tired and would like to—”

“I can’t think of anything I’d like to do more than eat pizza in your lab. With you,” I interrupt him, hastily, because at this point in our relationship I can tell when Carlos is building up to a monologue, based, not on scientific concepts and discovery that need a lot of explaining to be intelligible to a layperson like myself, but on nervousness—the same nervous awkwardness that I felt this morning, for instance, when I refrained from asking him whether it would be okay if I came to the lab on my own, bearing dinner in a plastic sack full of styrofoam cartons. “There is nothing I would like more than to buy dinner, and take it to the lab, and watch you work, and possibly ask tiresome and distracting questions about the work that you are doing. I realize that you were only offering the first part, about the dinner, but I’m afraid the second part, about the awkward questions, is virtually unavoidable if I am to spend any amount of time in your lab.”

Carlos smiles. He smiles, showing all of his teeth—which, I have lately come to realize, are not quite as symmetrical as I once imagined them to be, based on a cursory initial glance that formed the basis for my mental picture of him for the next few months, before we interacted face to face again. But I value the sight of them anyway, because Carlos’s smiles are usually small, shy, and slightly abashed, and a smile that shows his slightly imperfect but nonetheless lovable teeth is a rare and blessed occasion in the life of your humble reporter.

“Have you ordered already, or…?” says Carlos.

I have not, in fact, placed my to-go order. I relate this information to Carlos. He steps up to the counter and takes out his wallet and says, “Your usual?”

I was not intending to order my usual at all. But for the moment, I am so overcome by the simple thrill of the fact that I _have_ a usual, and that Carlos knows what it is, that all I can do is grin like a fool and nod. Carlos orders his food and mine, and he pays for it. I don’t mind that he pays for it, because it means that I will have an ironclad excuse to pay for our next joint meal, and with some careful maneuvering, I can make certain that it takes place at a far nicer restaurant. Carlos isn’t accustomed to being spoiled by romantic partners. I’m not sure he even understands the concept. I have been trying to teach him, but I have some headway to make yet.

When Rico hands the food over the counter, I insist on carrying it, less from chivalry and more from a desire to keep my hands occupied so that I don’t find myself clinging to Carlos like a limpet as we walk across the parking lot to his lab. I am not normally this clingy, Listeners; not physically, anyway. But between the disappointments of this morning, and the strain, distress, and distasteful politicking I was forced to undergo at work this afternoon, the idea of spending an hour or so in proximity to my honest, dependable, lovely Carlos is making me feel more than normally conscious of every inch of distance between us. 

To my pleasure and surprise, Carlos slips an arm around my waist as we climb the steps into the small stucco building housing his lab. I lean into his grip, which tightens in response; it’s nothing less than a good, old-fashioned sideways hug, and I relish it as I was intending to relish a long, hot bubble bath when I got back home. Only more so. Anything involving Carlos is always “more so”, in my book.

“There was something I wanted to tell you this morning,” says Carlos, holding the door open for me, then carefully guiding me to the precise spot in his lab which had been cleared and decontaminated and made safe for the consumption of food. “I stopped myself, because I didn’t know how to say it. There were too many variables. When I don’t say things, usually, it is the variables that are at fault. Does that make sense?

He’s looking at me urgently—almost pleadingly, which is an odd expression to see on his face. “Yes,” I say, although I’m not sure how honestly I can claim to mean it. “I understand.”

The relief that comes over his face is worth any amount of white lies, I decide. 

“What did the variables stop you from saying?” I ask, as I spread our food out on the decontaminated work surface.

His face clouds over again. “It’s…difficult,” he says. “Because the variables are still in place.”

I pause in the act of opening the boxes containing our dinner. I think back to earlier this morning. I think about the long, lonely minutes that I spent regarding the remnants of our breakfast. I remember that the present tense of regret is indecision, and I remember how I hesitated, when Carlos told me he would be alone at work in his lab all night. There were things I could have said to him then—things that, though I feared they would come across as demanding, or manipulative, I might still have said, because the fear existed nowhere except in my own head. If I had not been afraid; if I had not fallen instantly and easily into comfortable (no, not comfortable—customary) habits of thought, stemming from a time in our relationship before we had a relationship, when I dared not presume, dared not ask the things that I dreamed of asking Carlos; if I had trusted the delicate, yet resilient connection that is building between us, then I would have said the things that I did not, in the end, say.

And suddenly, I wonder, if this is what Carlos means when he talks about “variables”. If, by “variables”, he means the fear, the insecurity, the vulnerability that exists between two independent people who are attempting to follow their own trajectories in life, while maintaining the emotional proximity that binds them as a couple, with dreams of a future, a home. I wonder, if by “variables”, Carlos is referring to what I, in my rather more florid and less scientific style, call insecurity, fear of rejection, fear of overstepping boundaries, fear in all the dark, tendriled forms it takes when the thing that you fear is that some slight, thoughtless misstep on your part could threaten what you share together.

If that is what Carlos means, when he refers to “variables” that stopped him speaking this morning, then perhaps we aren’t so different after all. Perhaps Carlos, too, feels the same aching chasm of loss that I do when the demands of his work bear him inexorably away from the comfortable, comforting routines of our life. And perhaps—because of “variables”—he too had simply felt shy of asking for the simple comfort of inviting me to his lab to share a meal with him when he couldn’t be at home, with me, sharing a meal in front of the television.

Perhaps—it seems almost too much to hope for, but it is important to distinguish between the fears that we cling to because we are flawed beings, and fears that have grounding in reality—perhaps it isn’t merely wishful thinking to imagine that Carlos needs me as much as I need him? And that perhaps he, in his own way, is as frightened as I am of articulating those needs. Or perhaps he _did_ articulate them, and I simply failed to understand. Scientists, after all, don’t communicate like the rest of us; everyone knows that. But they do communicate, in their own way. 

And those of us who love them must learn to master the language they speak, and find within it the commonalities we share in our own language. No, not language—our feelings.

As I ponder this, and as Carlos reaches for his food, and as I hand him the little plastic sheath containing a fork, and a thin, inadequate napkin, and salt and pepper packets that will be instantly discarded—I brush the back of Carlos’s leg with the tip of my foot. He pauses and looks at me.

“Any time you’re working late in the lab, you know,” I tell him, “I could just—bring you dinner. It wouldn’t have to interrupt your work. You could just take a break for an hour or so, and then get back to it. I wouldn’t mind. No trouble at all in fact.”

Carlos stares at me for a moment, rice-based linguini smothered in alfredo sauce slipping off his plastic fork to rejoin the identical heap of white pasta in his disposable container.

“I would like that,” he says. “I miss you when I have to work late.”

My blood turns to champagne. It bubbles and fizzes and courses through my body as though it were much hotter than mere blood is wont to be. “I miss you when you work late, too.”

Carlos smiles at me. He aims a forkful of pasta at his mouth and misses. It lands on his white lab coat, but the white sauce doesn’t leave a stain. Carlos ignores it.

“Scientifically speaking, my concentration and efficiency always improve after I’ve taken a short break and seen you for awhile,” he says. “So it would make sense to factor it into my regular work schedule from now on, really.”

“Anything for science,” I say, handing him my own, inadequate and thin paper napkin, and watching as he mops the pasta up from the lapel of his lab coat. 

We don’t talk much, as we share our meal. But because we are together, and therefore sharing more than a meal, which is to say, an experience—there is much that passes between us. And I believe—if I am not giving way to another of my flights of fancy—that we both of us understand every bit of it.


End file.
